Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/142

 veneration for the ibis in Egypt. Here is evidently a belief that the tree-spirit hovered over its blood as the traders carried it to market, and that the danger that threatened the Egyptians was averted by the defensive power of their own sacred bird. The location of this Buto is disputed, but it was probably along some ancient desert trade-route such as that between Coptos and Berenice at the time of the Periplus. Buto was also the name of an Egyptian deity, borrowed from "God's Land" (Yemen).

Theophrastus has the same story of the tree guarded by serpents, but refers it to cinnamon (Hist. Plant., IX, 6).

According to Herodotus, all the fragrant gums of Arabia were similarly guarded, except myrrh; which may suggest that myrrh was from a more purely Joktanite district, less imbued with the animism of the earlier races of Arabia.

The same belief probably appears in the "fiery flying serpents" of Isaiah XXX, 60.

Medicinal waters were guarded by similar powers; a dragon sacred to Ares protected the sacred spring above Ismenian Apollo (Frazer, Pausanias, V, 43-5); while among the Arabs all medicinal waters were protected by jinns (W. Robertson Smith, op. cit., 168).

The faith of the Incense-Land presents many features in common with that of the Greeks. While Frazer is no doubt right in warning against indiscriminate assimilation of deities Greek, Egyptian and Semitic, there is certainly some truth in the words of Euripides' Bacchus (son of Jove and Semele, daughter of the Phoenician Cadmus) who came to Greece "having left the wealthy lands of the Lydians and Phrygians and the sun-parched plains of the Persians, and the Bactrian walls; and having come over the stormy land of the Medes, and the happy Arabia, and all Asia which lies along the coast of the Salt Sea,... there having established my mysteries"—and "every one of these foreign nations celebrates these orgies." According to Herodotus (III, 8 and I, 131), the only deities of the Incense-Land were Dionysus and Urania, whom they called Orotal and Alilat; while the Semitic people of Meroe (II, 29) worshipped Zeus (Ammon) and Bacchus (Osiris) whom Glaser assimilates with the Katabanic gods ’Am and Uthirat (Punt und die Südarabischen Reiche, 43). Now the invocations of Dionysus in the mysteries were "Evoe, Sabai, Bacchi, Hues, Attes, Attes, Hues!" and according to Cicero (De natura deorum, I, iii, 23) one of the names of Bacchus was Sabazius; in whose mysteries at Alaexandria, we are told by Clement (Protrept., ii, 16) persons initiated had a serpent drawn through the bosoms of their robes, and the reptile was identified